5G Rollout Expected To Take Many Years

Though there's no standard or agreed-upon requirement for 5G, “the mobile broadband industry is very future orientated and mobile broadband is the center of the connected world so this leads to a focus on 5G," Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas, said in an email from the MWC. "5G is only a vision at this time," he said. There's no ITU standard, but major wireless trade associations and mobile broadband vendors are giving recommendations for what 5G networks could look like in 2020 and beyond, he said. "It is a bit too early for consumers to expect to use a 5G network or device in 2020," Pearson said. 4G LTE will continue to be the major growing mobile broadband technology in the U.S., because a lot of work needs to be done before the industry would forecast any type of switch from 4G to 5G, he said.

Wireless device makers such as Ericsson and Nokia demonstrated 5G technology at MWC. Nokia demonstrated a prototype of 5G mm- and cm-wave radio systems that use advanced antennas and operate in the 3.5-70 GHz bands for extreme throughput and ultra-low latency, it said in news release. Nokia also showcased Extended Nokia Mobile Guard, which detects malware or abnormal Internet of Things device behavior via profiling. When an IoT device is hacked and its processor or Internet connection is used for fraud and other attacks, Mobile Guard recognizes the devices and takes actions for mitigation, Nokia said.

Ericsson said it signed a memorandum of understanding with KT, South Korea's leading telecom provider, for collaboration on technologies related to next-generation networks. The MoU said the companies will focus on standardization, spectrum strategy, network architecture and deployment scenarios, and massive connectivity for the IoT. "5G will be a key component in the industry's movement toward the networked society,” said Thomas Norén, Ericsson head-radio product management, in a Wednesday news release. “With ultra-high bit rates of more than 10 Gbps, we will deliver radio network capability of more than 1,000 times today's LTE networks."

While there are no standards for 5G, analysts agree on a few things about it. Akshay Sharma, research director at Gartner Research, said 5G is going to be faster, will have low latency and will let multiple wireless technologies share resources. “You’re going to have tens of billions of devices all communicating, so to handle all of that requires some new thinking about how the radio networks are architected,” he said. 5G is at the prototype stage, with companies doing trials and demonstrating devices, Sharma said. He expects drafts of standards to be proposed in 2016-17 and standardization of 5G by 2018. Sharma expects select trials or deployments to start in 2020, with 5G not hitting the mainstream market until 2025.

Sharma said a 5G world will let a consumer stream something on a TV until the consumer walks away, when the show or movie will switch to that person’s phone without much, if any, interruption. When that person is home, the mobile device would stream the program over Wi-Fi until that consumer walks out the door and then the device would switch to 5G without any interruption to streaming. Sharma said the goal is for 5G to enhance the customer experience and improve the technology that will better serve the IoT. “There will be a lot more local intelligence, it will be a lot more analytics driven, being able to come up with intelligent decisions, spectrum sharing and sensing what spectrum is in use and not touching it,” he said. “We’re going to get a lot more intelligence in our mobile networks.”

With 5G far from implementation, AT&T is focusing on expanding LTE-Advanced coverage, emailed a spokesman. “Our initial deployment of LTE-Advanced featuring carrier aggregation focuses on markets that are high-density and high traffic.” The next step is for AT&T to roll out more LTE-Advanced technologies including updates to its heterogeneous networks, which expand mobile network capacity and are a 3GPP industry standard, he said. Many features considered to be 5G requirements likely will be implemented first as LTE-Advanced extensions in advance of a full 5G rollout, he said.

Self-driving cars are only a few years away, said KT CEO Chang-Gyu Hwang, the 5G keynoter Wednesday at the MWC. He expects “some 5G services” will be available by the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang. Sharma said it’s likely 5G will have some operational abilities by the 2020 Olympic Summer Games in Tokyo. He expects there to be some Ultra HD video ready for demonstration on tablets and other devices for the 2020 Olympics.

The global race for 5G is underway, said Jonathan Spalter, Mobile Future chairman. But he agreed a wide-scale deployment isn't likely until at least 2020. The U.S. has been a leader in next-generation wireless technology, and Spalter said the country should do "everything in our power to ensure we don’t cede that ground." Network engineers, mobile technologists and the investment community are focused on the wireless network's evolution, and "we must maintain a smart policy climate to foster continued growth, investment and leadership," Spalter said.